Sir Philip Dilley told MPs: ‘In hindsight it would have been much better if I had come back as early as I could [from a Barbados holiday during the floods].’
Photograph: PA

So Sir Philip Dilley is going to spend more time with his family, in whichever home he feels most comfortable. After misleading the public over his whereabouts over Christmas, as the north of England was awash with floods, he resigned as chair of the Environment Agency on Monday.

As the rain fell on Boxing day, he said he was at home with his family. Then, having been tracked down to Barbados, he clarified that he was “at home with his family, who are from Barbados”. Now it appears his wife is actually from Jamaica, 1,200 miles away.

It was a PR disaster, at precisely the wrong moment. The staff of the Environment Agency (EA) were working round the clock to protect lives and property, but Dilley’s disaster commanded headlines. The EA staff did a valiant job - they had to, being 800 less in number than in 2010 due to budget cuts - but found their organisation in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Dilley’s main reason for resigning was, he said, that “the expectations of the role have expanded to require the chairman to be available at short notice throughout the year ... In my view this is inappropriate in a part-time non-executive position, and this is something I am unable to deliver”. This contrasts awkwardly with his statement when he was appointed to the £100,000-a-year job in 2014, that he would work six or seven days a week “if there is a crisis”.

The presence of the EA chairman was never going to stop the waters rising, but the reassurance of seeing the boss in his wellies is necessary in a crisis.

To summarise, in the first year of David Cameron’s coalition, he cut capital spending on flood defences by 27% year-on-year, ignoring the 2008 Pitt review that concluding rising funding was needed. Flood defence spending never recovered to the level inherited from Labour during the whole coalition parliament, if you exclude – as the National Audit Office deemed appropriate – the emergency funding delivered to patch up defences after the winter floods of 2013-14.

In January 2012, the government’s own research showed increased flooding is the greatest threat posed by climate change in England. But when heavy flooding hit in the summer of 2012, I revealed that almost 300 proposed flood defences had not gone ahead as planned following the cuts.

In the midst of the 2013-14 floods, the government’s own climate change advisers told ministers there was a £500m hole in their flood defence plans. The shortfall would result in £3bn of damages, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) warned. The National Audit Office added their warning, finding that the risk of flooding was indeed rising as a result of government funding cuts.

In June 2015, the CCC recommended the government should “develop a strategy to address the increasing number of homes in areas of high flood risk”. But in October the government replied that such a strategy “would not be appropriate at this time”. In November 2015, the Association of Drainage Authorities warned that “the Environment Agency’s funding for maintaining flood assets has fallen by 14%”, increasing flood risk.

Yet despite this catalogue of failure, the government has got off the hook once again. That, in no small part, is because a man with a tan put himself into very hot water.